YMMV / Lighthouse: The Dark Being

• Esoteric Happy Ending: Or more accurately, Fridge Downer Ending. In the best ending, you capture the otherworldly Big Bad and rescue the main NPC, the inventor Krick and his kidnapped daughter, to eventually bid them farewell back in their home by a cozy fire. However, there are a couple of other implications that the developers apparently never thought of, since Krick vows to destroy the machine he created that links to the fantastical other world. Not only is he abandoning the most spectacular scientific development in history, despite the fact that in rescuing him you made said fantastical world perfectly safe to visit and explore, and you must presumably now return to your mundane existence as an author in this world; more seriously, there's another major NPC, a paraplegic girl in a life-support machine unable to travel, whose former companions were all killed in a tragic accident long before and, without the continued companionship of the player character whom she befriends and helps capture the Big Bad, won't have anything else to do apart from potentially making friends with Martin's Birdman, assuming she's capable of reprogramming him.
• Nightmare Fuel
  • The Dark Being himself, a thin grotesque humanoid...thing that only speaks in gibberish, decked in weird tattoos, and has a thong as its only form of clothing. And the thing comes out of nowhere and steals Amanda right as the game's just started.
  • Jeremiah Krick had met the inventor, Martin during one of his portal's test runs, hence how he was given the puzzle box. But when you find Martin's tower, the man is already dead - to the point that someone picked his eyes out. You can even dislodge his head from the body!
  • The sunken ship. We get a fair warning as to what happened to it by its distress message, but actually finding it later on drives it home that every one of the Priests is dead. One section of it that you have to pass through even shows a skull amid the debris.
• That One Puzzle: It wouldn't be a Sierra game without one!
  • How do you get past one of Martin's security birds? You could throw a rock at it, or play it safe and put a toy bird in a cuckoo clock.
  • There's a catwalk out, so how do you fix it? Do you hold it in place with your long umbrella? Not just that, but you have to locate a very inconspicuous latch nearby at the same time!
  • The Kinetic Sculpture in the Temple is one of the most notorious examples. You're faced with a pair of wind chimes to play with, and the more you click them, the more said sculpture opens up, with a set of levers inside to fiddle with down the line. It turns out that you're supposed to count how many times you clicked the wind chimes, depending on what step you've gotten to on the sculpture.
  • You'd think it'd be simple to unlock the last puzzle in Martin's box by use of the symbol code you got by solving the slider puzzle, right? Yes and no. You first have to input the first symbol of the code on each tumbler, then the second, and then the full code
• The Scrappy: Oh, poor Liryl. She's your main source of info on what to do in the parallel world, but you have to sit through possibly 20 minutes of her talking. What makes this even worse is the malfunctioning life support that keeps messing up her speech, she won't let you leave until she's told you everything, and the relevant portions of dialogue are inconsistently scripted among those that are just for flavor. On the plus side, a single click stops her line in progress, allowing you to skip to the next part at will.
  • The position for this label also lies with the corrupt Birdman, who will try to impede your progress by stealing crucial inventory items (which you can get back later, thankfully), and even destroy something you need if annoyed enough.

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